person they have ever met; your gravely ill friend has just had a miraculous recovery; and you have a call informing you that you have just won the Lottery Jackpot.
Now check your posture, energy and motivational levels, the alertness of your senses and your sociability, and feel the difference!
The game you have just played demonstrates how every cell of your body acts as a major communicator to other people. Being aware of this allows you to begin the journey to becoming a master reader of body language. The findings of the game are confirmed in formal studies, like the ones that follow:
Case Study – See and Tell
Psychologists Geoffrey Beattie and Heather Shovelton of the University of Manchester have found that gesture helps convey huge amounts of information. They discovered that when people see storytellers’ gestures as well as hearing their voices, they pick up about 10 per cent more accurate information about the story than when they are listening to the voice alone. Beattie and Shovelton say: ‘gestures are every bit as rich communicatively as speech; meaning is divided between the hand and the mouth’.
Case Study – Mirror Neurons
An American study has shown that gesture and speech are simply two outlets for identical thought-processes, and both are designed to help you convey those thought-processes to other individuals.
Joanna Iverson, from the University of Missouri, and her colleague Esther Thelen, from the University of Bloomington, Indiana, point to the direct link between movement and meaning that is found in a group of brain cells known as ‘mirror neurons’, confirmed by a study of monkeys.
The mirror neurons fire both when a monkey makes a particular movement, and also when it watches another monkey making the same movement. Intriguingly, these mirror neurons are found in the region of the monkey’s brain that exactly corresponds to the speech-production region of the human brain.
Who Am I?
‘If you want to know yourself, see how others behave; if you want to understand others, look in your own heart.’
(Friedrich von Schiller)
The secret of Social Intelligence – to building rapport with others, setting them at ease in your company, making people genuinely glad to be with you, and mixing easily with all types of people – is to ‘know yourself’.
If you are comfortable ‘being in your skin’, you will have inner confidence about yourself, and will know your values and standards. That confidence will radiate out from you, through your body language, and will rub off positively on the people around you.
You can use this Socially Intelligent knowledge to your advantage, even if you are in a situation where confidence is the last thing you are feeling! If you stand with poise and make eye contact, you will exude an aura of confidence. Even better – the more you ‘act’ confident, the more confident you will find yourself becoming!
However, you should be aware that sometimes the signals you are sending out are not the ones you think you are! An acquaintance discovered that while she aimed to project an ultra-feminine and ultra-sexy image, she had no idea that this image was actually interpreted as being overpowering and intimidating!
Who Are You?
You now know that your body language reveals your true thoughts and feelings, despite yourself. And so, if you become adept at reading other people’s body language – sensing whether they are uncomfortable, bored, enthusiastic, upset or worried – you will increase your Social Intelligence multiple-fold.
Studies, like the ones below, have demonstrated that those people able to read body language have many advantages over those who cannot.
Case Study – Read Me, Benefit You!
A Harvard psychologist, Robert Rosenthal, and his students devised a test of people’s ability to read non-verbal body signals and language. Rosenthal and his students tested over 7,000 people both in the United States and 18 other countries.
In the tests the subjects were shown a series of videotapes of a young woman expressing a wide range of feelings. The scenes depicted hatred and loathing, a jealous rage, peace and tranquillity, asking forgiveness, motherly love, showing gratitude, and passion.
In all the videos, the sound was muffled so that no speech could be heard. In addition, in each portrayal, one or more of the channels of non-verbal communication had been blanked out. For example, in one the body might be blocked out and only the facial expression shown, in another the facial expressions removed while all bodily gestures remained, and so on.
The results?
A direct correlation was found between being able to read body language and being more sensitive, more well-adjusted emotionally, more outgoing, and, most importantly, more popular.
You will be pleased to learn that this popularity was also directly correlated with success in romantic and sexual relationships!
The success generated by possessing Social Intelligence skills is also reflected in schools. The American Psychological Society reported the results of tests done with 1,011 children that showed that those children who were able to read body language were among the most emotionally stable, did better in academic subjects, and were the most popular.
Understanding body language is of vital importance in social communication. A good friend of mine observed that by playing just three minutes of golf with a new acquaintance, you will learn nearly everything you need to know about that individual, including their ability to accept and learn from success and failure, their generosity, their concern for others, their appreciation of nature, their humour (or lack of it!), how positive/negative they were, their general energy levels, their degree of focus and their honesty.
The Secret of Social Intelligence – Smile!
There is a very simple secret to Social Intelligence – smile at people!
A human smile radiates warmth, confidence, a positive attitude, happiness and, very significantly, a welcoming openness to others.
‘A man without a smiling face must not open a shop.’
(Chinese proverb)
A simple smile is the best way to win friends and influence people. The thing that first attracts most people to someone else is their smile. And when we see a smile, our brains trigger our own smiling muscles, so that we smile back!
Brian Bates, co-author of the BBC book and television series The Human Face, confirms the importance of smiling in society:
‘We would often rather share our confidences, hopes and money with smilers for deep reasons which are often beyond our conscious awareness. Spontaneous
